Wednesday, October 3, 2012

October 25, 2012
I’m reading a book titled, Holy Misogyny: Why the Sex
and Gender Conflicts in the Early Church Still Matter, by April DeConick.Its revelations on vilification of the female in the first centuries of
Christianity would repel even most conservatives today. I had encountered much
of this material before but had forgotten the details—who said or did what
outrageous thing. The ugly story presents a backdrop to contemporary events and
helps to explain the glacial pace of change today in the treatment of women and
girls.

In these excerpts “Church Fathers” reveal prejudices so
contorted as to call into question their soundness of mind.

[Jerome, translator of the Bible into Latin,] spells out all
the details of fostering a virgin whose body would become the temple of God.
The girl child must be kept in total seclusion . . . She should be taught such
shame of her female body that after puberty she should never bathe again, being
humiliated by the mere thought of seeing herself naked. She should learn to
mortify her body, to subjugate it and live in deliberate squalor to spoil her
natural sexiness.

Epiphanius claims that women are

“unstable, prone to error, and mean spirited.” Death entered
the world through a woman’s action. As a consequence, she cannot be trusted or
obeyed.

Tertullian earns his reputation as supreme woman-hater with
these lines:

Do you not know that you are an Eve? . . . You are the Devil’s gateway. You are the unsealer of that forbidden
tree. You are the first deserter of the divine Law. You are she who persuaded him whom the Devil was not valiant enough
to attack. . . . On account of your
desert, that is death, even the Son of God had to die.

Jerome opposed marriage and held up virginity as the only
acceptable Christian lifestyle. Augustine finishes this picture of extreme asceticism
verging on emotional disorder.

According to Augustine, the “hideous” unwilled erection of
his penis was the consequence of sin and woman was its source.

Augustine considered all carnal desire to be sinful. He was
the first to teach the fiction that woman’s body, when accepting semen in the
sex act, becomes like soil to seed sown by her husband. He also was the first
to argue that a woman has no authority over her own body, her husband does.

In the fourth century, even those who argued against
Jerome’s denigration of marriage and Augustine’s conflation of sex with sin
agreed that woman was inferior to man, subordinate to man, and must be
submissive to man. So complete was fourth century contempt for the female that
women could earn respect only by becoming men. This belief found its way into
Saying 114 in the Gospel of Thomas, which has Jesus saying of Mary Magdalene,

I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that
she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who
will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Some women went into the desert to starve themselves until
they lost their breasts and stopped menstruating.

It is tempting—I have done it—to dismiss opinions of the
woman-hating “Church Fathers” as so grotesque they can’t possible influence any
one today. But their weird misogyny peeks out from the statements of Catholic
bishops who fight against equality for women in the Church today. When bishops
came out against the Affordable Care Act and nuns dared to dissent from that
opinion, the bishops were aghast that sisters would publicly disagree with them.
Their words reflected this deep reservoir of misogyny in our tradition—the
conviction that a female can have no authority.

The hierarchy’s arguments against women’s ordination
obviously hearken back to the same early-centuries misogyny, echoing the
patristic belief that woman’s body is shameful by claiming that her body does
not constitute the correct sacramental “matter” for ordination. Catholic women
do not stand alone in enduring abuse. In 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention
revoked women’s ordination and excluded them from all pastoral ministry that
involved leadership.

In the secular realm the fight for women’s equality is progressing
a bit faster, but apparently our religious tradition also puts a brake on
progress there. Reverberations of its sex and gender distortions pop out in the
clumsy campaign rhetoric of conservatives. That such statements have caused
huge controversies and fodder for comedians seems to me a healthy sign. It
suggests we are moving out of the diseased view presented so graphically in books
like Holy Misogyny.

Holy Misogyny 2, November 2

I’m sorry that comments I “publish” are not really published
by blogger. It has happened several times and is annoying. Usually, however, I
get a flurry of email responses that do not go through blogger. As a result of
one exchange, I add this to the previous post.

The misshapen views of “Church Fathers” on women cannot be
separated from their theology, which reflects their opinions on gender.
Imagining God to be entirely male with no vestige of the feminine fits their
twisted view perfectly.

We are trained to respect
the "Fathers," but knowing what we know today, we should critically
examine their words. Because of their contempt for half of humanity and
creation, we will find distortions in their thoughts about God and human
relationships—the heart of spirituality.

They were not the first to believe in
and teach patriarchy. Scholars debate its origins, but we know that it did
not exist in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies. By the time of classical
Greece, the intellectual origins of the West, patriarchy was firmly embedded. Plato,
Aristotle, and other classical greats had the unshakeable conviction that women
were inferior to men, and it imbues their writings. Aristotle, for instance,
said that a female is an incomplete male, “as it were, a deformity.”

Our Judeo-Christian tradition was imbued with the same, as
is abundantly evident in the Bible, where “the Lord” jealously competes with
other idols for exclusive worship by “his people.” Raphael Patai, historian of
ancient Hebrew culture, wrote in The
Hebrew Goddess,

Every Hebrew-speaking individual from early childhood was
imbued with the idea that God was a masculine deity. No subsequent teaching
about the aphysical, incomprehensible, or transcendental nature of the deity,
could eradicate this early mental image of the masculine God.

When I was studying at the School of Theology in the 1980s,
I found a delightfully eloquent refutation of the patriarchal view coming from
a people close to the earth. Rodney Venberg, a Bible translator for a people
of Southwestern Chad in Africa, wrote that their word for God (Ifray) was related to their word for
mother, This made his job of translating the Bible difficult and produced a
weird kind of speech among Christians that confused their neighbors. Converts
wanted to know if it was necessary to change their talk to become a Christian. Venberg
wrote,

To speak of God (Ifray) with
such terms as "he" and "Father" was totally
inconsistent with their grammar and went against their whole notion of the
creation (after all had a man ever given birth to a child?).

Fortunately,
we are today moving out of the male-dominated era as part of a huge
shift in human consciousness. Because the female is
associated more closely with nature and less with dominance, I expect a
non-patriarchal
world will do a better job of addressing political, economic,
ecological, and nuclear threats to the planet and all its inhabitants.

Comment: Kathleen said:
Comedians observe behavior they perceive as discrimininatory or biased
and then communicate it to their audiences in a humorous way. A current
example is how Stephen Colbert is offering a humorous million dollar
challenge to Donald Trump with the same deadline of October 31 that Mr.
Trump is giving President Obama to provide information to Mr. Trump. Mr.
Colbert implies that his request is just as outrageous (and silly) as
Mr. Trump's.

If only we could joke about women's issues, but,
unfortunately, as long as we have mostly male legislators who feel they
can decide what's best for women's bodies and their healthcare, it's a
man's world. We can call it the United States, but it's still ruled by
and for men.

The imaginary lord god, October 3, 2012
On October 13 and 14 I will be at the Women &
Spirituality Conference in Mankato, MN to give a presentation and attend other
presentations. My topic is Sexist God-talk.

God as exclusively "HeHimHis" describes male power
as natural, normal, proper, and right, and female power as unnatural, abnormal,
improper, and wrong. In this way, the Christian “Lord” promotes male domination
and therefore gender abuse. In fact, it promotes all types of inequality by
establishing hierarchy and domination as the essential, even sacred, structure
of the universe.

Those of us still in the Christian tradition can help to
transform sexist God-talk with its immoral power structure by taking every
opportunity to insert inclusive God-talk into liturgical and everyday language.
This workshop will suggest many ways to diminish the power of “the Lord” by
naming the Holy with feminine and non-hierarchical terms.

This is timely after we watched Half the Sky and maybe cried a little to see how little girls are
sold into slavery and getting their genitals cut in the practice of female
genital mutilation, called less graphically “female circumcision.” They need us
to pay attention to this cruel practice.

The reason for cutting little girls’ genitals? To make sure
they will not get pleasure from sex, the better to control their bodies. I’m
not making this up. A practitioner said as much in her own language.

The reason she had no intention of stopping it?She’s making good money at it—it’s what she
said. Every day she cuts about 30 girls around eight years of age, without
anesthesia or sterilization. Without warning the girls are suddenly grabbed by
their mothers or grandmothers and taken to the hut of the practitioner. Their legs
are tied to prevent kicking, and their screams are ignored.

Don’t imagine that this is like male circumcision. The
clitoris is removed, not only cut. In 15% of the cases, the genitals are cut
off entirely. All that’s left is a hole to let urine and menstrual blood flow
through.

So what’s the connection between girls used as sex objects and sexist God-talk?
Religious God-talk trains people to worship an idol, an
imaginary lord god who endorses male domination. It teaches everybody, not only
religious people, that females have no status. Real transformation can come
only if we allow women to become confident and powerful. This requires cleaning our religious language
of God-talk that reduces the Source of All That Is to a lord or lords,
definitely male and definitely lording it over others, especially women and
girls because female terms for God are forbidden.

It’s not hard to clean up the sexist stuff. Just cut out the
“HeHimHis” and “Lord,” and add Mother”
in equal portions to “Father.” There are
many enlightening terms for God that would gently and persuasively teach people
about the ineffable Transcendent One.

I understand the impediments to change. But refusing to make any effort to reduce sexism in God-talk, out of habit or because of church authority, I find unconscionable.

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To purchase or to learn more about God Is Not
Three Guys in the Sky:
Cherishing Christianity without Its Exclusive Claims,
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